Timothy King – Page 13 – Mechanical Sympathy

How Low Can We Go?

Just bumped into another Dad from my street who no longer comes out to get his kids on the other school bus in the morning. He told me a sad story.

Our local school bus companies were bought up by an American company who promptly fired everyone and rehired them at minimum wage. That didn’t bump up the investor returns enough so they also cut staff and combined bus routes. Their 8:30 pickup was becoming more like an 8:55 or 9:10 pickup. This happened for weeks on end. He finally went to the company and they reorganized their buses (again) to try and stabilize pickups. This is the 3rd time this has happened this year. This is why I don’t see them in the morning any more.

I wonder if the school board gets back money on this with cheaper rates. I wonder if all of those people who now can’t afford their mortgages, car payments or household costs (forget luxuries like having their kids play sports) are happy that the board gets such good rates. I wonder if the publicly funded school boards did anything whatsoever to try and resolve this without people who do a vital job being treated like refugees.

This reminds me of Michael Moore’s bit on airline pilots in the States in his last film.

What we appear to have here are publicly funded and operated school systems that seem intent on lowering the standard of living of thousands of people to improve bottom lines Am I the only one this seems absurd to?

I then told him about where our school custodians are. That same school board is intent on cutting back their responsibilities until it can replace them with minimum wage paid contracted cleaning services. Everything I’ve heard from board politics around who has been hired to perform this, to the ground level response of our own custodians, has supported this explanation. Once again, a publicly funded school board seems intent on lowering the standard of living of hundreds of people in its area in order to lower its bottom line. The fact that minimum wage paid people with no particular on-going interest in their work will be responsible for numerous health and safety issues in schools doesn’t seem to be at issue.

As a younger man I was never a fan of unions, until I saw the epic mess that “business” makes of even simple situations. Whereas a union might protect the odd jerk while protecting many honest employees from abuse and exploitation, private business seems to screw virtually everyone in order to pay off a select few of the richest, usually while dismantling a working system in the process. Given a choice, I’d rather see as few honest people get screwed as possible, so union it is.

Private ownership of what should be publicly owned utilities never works out. The businesses squeeze it for as much as they can with no eye for sustainability. They reduce the effectiveness of a service to just below the bare minimum accepted by the public, then try and hold it there for as long as they can, hiring off shore call centres to field the calls at minimum cost. It’s been a long time since big business has done even it’s own R&D work, let alone truly add anything of value to human civilization.

So here I am, listening to yet another story of Globalization in a world that has proven again and again that it simply doesn’t work. Simplifying ownership into multinationals injures regional interests and only benefits a few of the very rich, making everyone else poorer in the process. The big lie is that we’re all told that we could be that rich minority if we: try hard enough – are smart enough – know the right people – whatever, but that simply isn’t the case.

In the meantime, I’m paying taxes (and working) for a public organization that promotes the povertization of entire sectors of employees that depend on it. Thousands poorer to so a select few can move into a higher income bracket.

Machine Learning

I listened to the Khan Institute TED talk the other day, and can see how a system like that could be flexible enough to adapt to each individual learner while giving the teacher fantastically accurate feedback on where problems lie and how to address them. A future like that looks bright indeed. Teachers would be free to focus on resolving problems and offering enrichment to basic skill sets, rather than standing in front of a crowd reciting facts. For skills based learning in languages and mathematics, this is revolutionary. This is technology used to differentiate a system that has developed some very habitual and static tendencies.

So, things are looking up, right? Education is slowly adapting to the technology wave and integrating it into a more flexible and responsive form of teaching. Then why do I think that once in place, this would allow governments to automate classrooms and drastically reduce the number of teachers in schools? Why do I think that, ultimately, this will dehumanize education?

I watched Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation recently (one of the top rated documentaries of all time, I highly recommend it). This has to be one of the smartest men I’ve ever listened to pulling no punches on a broad spectrum of Western history. This part (starting at 35:35), in particular, resonated with me about the times in which we live.

I think he’s ultimately right; machines do work slavishly for their owners, and those owners tend to be social powers in their own rights. Whether we’re talking the technology companies themselves, multi-nationals or governments, technology in general, and computers in particular, do as much (or more) to dictate our responses than they do to free us from conventions. If anything, computers are a more invasive and totalitarian convention than any art medium or the written word ever were. Digital natives aren’t people with a magical understanding of computers, they are human beings who have been taught to interface with them on a subconscious level. The industrial revolution started in the physical world and now continues its romp through the mental world, redefining human abilities in terms of how accurately and completely we can relate to digital technology.

Watching my poor grade 10s struggling through the standardized literacy test (in which they are identified by numbers and bar codes) today without their cyborg implants is reminding me just how pervasive cybernetics have become. They looked like ghosts without their constant media streams of video, sound and social connection. Watching them try to deal with 10 minutes of unneeded time at the end of the test without an onslaught of media was astonishing. They looked like they were in rehab.

Perhaps, as we grow through technological adolescence, it will become obvious that, at best, we will have a brave new world, at worst, a 1984. Digital technology will, ultimately, create a more manageable population, one that becomes easier to monitor while also becoming instinctively tuned to the needs of the machines that ‘serve’ them. A population that knows how to write (as long as it’s on WORD), or make music (as long as it’s on Garageband). Anyone who has watched a herd of high schools staring at Facebook can speak to its effectiveness as a herding tool.

More worrying is the sameness you tend to get out of student work based on the particular technology they used (we didn’t all used to self-identify through the editable parts of our facebook pages). Hand written documents are original in many ways that the boiler plate WORD DOC is not, but you ask students to hand write anything now (or draw anything – why bother when I can google it?) and they immediately ask, ‘what’s the point?’ Presentations have become powerpoints, then prezis, templates replace design, we find ourselves in a spiraling web of more intellectually focused (and limiting) applications; we start to develop an app mentality.

Machines will always favor efficiency over aesthetics, or ease of management over originality, or clear direction over multiple options. Their ones and zeros, by necessity, simplify the world their biological fore bearers created them from.

A few years ago I saw EPIC2014. It made some of my sharpest grade 12 media students cry. Here you have the concept of an individualized media feed, that gives you what you want, and nothing else. For the brightest, it becomes a nuanced, deep information tool, but for most of the population it feeds them what they want to hear: lies and gossip, while reinforcing their prejudices (sort of like Fox News). There might be some truth in that. If you’ve ever seen how students make use of social media, you can see how the stronger students reign it in, make use of it and control it, while weaker students are ruled by it.

I think that this will be the ultimate deciding factor: will clever people make use of technology to dominate, or will they use it to free us from conventions and allow us to think as optimally as we can? Looking at human history, the answer isn’t very flattering, but I hope for the freedom.

Thin Ice

I came from the relative security and certainty of teaching English onto the thin ice of an optional subject area. Now it’s an optional subject area that I think is vital to student success in the 21st Century, but it’s optional none-the-less.

Why did I spend north of four grand to get qualified in computer technology? Because it has been a part of my life for so long and I wanted to acknowledge that by teaching it. By recognizing my industry experience I feel like getting qualified in computer technology has honoured the work I did before I was a teacher. It also opens up the door to students gaining real world technology experience before becoming swamped in it. I’m passionate about teaching technology expertise to both staff and students.

Teaching a subject like this is perilous. You’ve spent a lot of money and time to get the qualification and then you suddenly find the ground has shifted and you aren’t teaching it. This happened to me before with visual art. I took the AQ hoping to teach it and suddenly the door closed and someone is transferred in. That might have been a one off, but it happened again with computers, so I’m twice bitten twice shy.

Today I staggered out of a heads’ meeting that offered three future headship structures, my job as computer head didn’t exist in any of them. I attempted to argue my case, and a number of heads kindly spoke for me, but when administration presents your choices and what you do isn’t on any of them, you have to wonder if what you’re doing is considered valuable, or even helpful.

There was a lot of talk about what the future holds for our school and how our headship structure should support that future. Apparently computers and a supportive technology environment don’t have a place in our school’s future. That is only slightly less exhausting than the idea that what I’ve been doing in the school has hurt rather than helped. It was suggested that everyone should wait months for support, even in cases where I could get things going in moments. This is the future we’re aiming for because we don’t want a headship centred around computers?

Technology use isn’t decreasing in our school, and how we’re making use of technology isn’t nearly as monolithic as it once was; the variety of tech in our school has exploded. Ten years ago we had a single kind of printer in our building, now we have more than thirty different kinds. Ten years ago the board used to take care of things like network cables and lab setup, not any more. In a proliferate, increasingly complex and less centrally supported technology environment, we balk at localized support?

The role of computer support in our school is onerous, but one of the things it does for me (sometimes, when I’m not getting bumped for a colleague from another school), is to ensure that I’ll be teaching at least some computer technology classes. Seeing the work I’ve done as a head given no future has left me wondering if I’ve asked my family to spend thousands of dollars on qualifications that I won’t be able to exercise in the future. That is frustrating on a lot of levels.

There are a lot of ups and downs in teaching. The political ground on which you stand is often not what it appears to be, and while many people seem to act out of a sense of certainty, what we are asked to teach is actually very perilous and subject to the whims of others.

It’s a cold Monday night in February and I’m finding the extra energy I’ve thrown into my profession over the past several years to be in question. It’s not the kind of place you do your best work from.

Greasy Hands Preachers

I got a copy of The Greasy Hands Preachers through Vimeo the other day. I enjoyed Long Live The Kings, though the hipster meter got pegged a couple of times, TGHP was similar.

The Greasy Hands Preachers interviews builders in the current custom motorcycle scene under the pretext of emphasizing the value of skilled manual labour. The movie is nicely shot (though sometimes gratuitously hand held and pull zoomed). By using off-the-cuff interviews you get glimpses into the deeper motivations of these custom builders, most of whom have more in common with sculptures than mechanics.

I’ve spent most of my life in an orbit back to valuing my smart hands. In my late teens I was apprenticing as a millwright and struggling with the idea that I was undervaluing my mind. The thought of decades of repetitive, menial work drove me to eventually quit and go to university where I could finally prove to myself that I’m smarter than people told me I was.

But smart hands don’t like inactivity. The intimate act of dismantling, understanding and healing a machine stays with you, and your hands itch to make things work again. Cars had devolved from a special interest to a utilitarian necessity for me. Working on them was menial rather than scratching an infatuation. It wasn’t until I started riding a couple of years ago that I found a machine that fostered a sufficiently intimate relationship to warrant infatuation. The ability to express my smart hands on a motorbike and heal the machine is half the thrill of riding.

The Greasy Hands Preachers are preaching to the converted with me. The

arc from white to blue collar work experienced by several of the people in the film is one familiar to me. But rather than pierce the veil and coherently express the underlying urges behind the resurging DIY ethos, GHP only hints at it. I think this is a result of their unscripted interview approach. Asking an artist to spontaneously and coherently express their process is unlikely to produce a clear view of what they do. Expecting them to be able to do so while on camera isn’t going to lead the viewer to a deep, nuanced understanding of how a mechanical artist values their hands.

Were it me, I would have started with the interviews and then had a scripted followup that clarified and deepened the narrative. I can’t help but think GHP is an opportunity lost.

If you want to look right into the heart of the DIY resurgence pick up Shopclass As Soulcraft and discover an intelligent explanation of the value of skilled labour. I was hoping that Greasy Hands Preachers would approach Crawford’s brilliant little book in terms of realizing the value of hands-on work, but instead it’s a pretty, sometimes banal film that hints at deeper ideas.

Would I recommend The Greasy Hands Preachers? Certainly. It’s a beautifully filmed opportunity to consider an important part of being human. If you read Shopclass As Soulcraft first (as I’m guessing the makers of GHP didn’t) you’d be ready to create your own meaning, which is probably better than being spoon fed anyway.

Around Huron

It’s just past 8am on day one of the ride. Even this early in the morning it’s already in the mid-twenties and the sun is relentless. The padding I thought I’d try in my helmet was a bad idea, and by the time I reach Creemore I’m working on a full scale headache. Thirty seconds after we stop the Roof lid is back to normal and it works like a champ for the rest of the trip. Motorcycle gear is an ongoing process of fine tuning, especially when you mess around with something that already works.

This trip grew out of a friend’s cross country anniversary ride with his wife on his new-to-him Goldwing. We were originally going to drop down to the ferry on Manitoulin Island for the ride home after day one, but the ferry is booked solid during the day so I started looking at another way home. Having never been to Northern Michigan, it seemed like a good idea to wrap around Lake Huron. It’s just over 1500kms of wilderness riding with few people in between.

The goodbye in Creemore went long as we’d been accompanied by friends out that far, so we got back on the road just as the sun was going fully nuclear. Day One was the longest of our trip, five hundred kilometres around Georgian Bay up to the small town of Massey, Ontario. A gas and lunch stop in Perry Sound followed by a couple of road side stops along the way made the heat bearable with lots of consuming of liquids at each stop. You know it’s hot when you’re sweating freely at highway speeds.

Mohawk Motel: clean, cheap & odd!

We rolled into the Mohawk Motel in Massey just past 4pm. The grass was brown and crisp, just like us. The motel was basic but clean with air conditioning. Everyone cold showered and relaxed for a while before we wandered out into town only to discover that the only restaurant was closed early due to it being hot. We were told to walk down the street to a variety store that also doubled as the local fast food joint. Forty five minutes of waiting in forty degree heat later I’d paid forty bucks for a cheeseburger, fries and a couple of slices of pizza. We staggered back to the hotel and called it a day.

The next morning Massey totally redeemed itself with a fantastic breakfast at the Back Home Bistro. As we finished up the eggs and bacon, rain moved in. It was still in the mid-twenties, but humid and wet. We rode into heavier and heavier rain as we traveled west over the top of Georgian Bay. A brief stop in Blind River to check on my stoic pillion had us bump into a couple doing a similar route to our Huron circumnavigation; it wasn’t the last time we’d meet them.

The rain came and went before finally relenting as we rode into Sault Ste. Marie. We parted ways after a surprisingly excellent and cost effective lunch at Pino’s Supermarket where you can get a brick oven baked pizza and amazing sausage on a bun for next to nothing.

Jeff & MA were on their way to Wawa up on Lake Superior, while Max and I were headed over to the border crossing into Northern Michigan. After a day and half together we’d made good time, covered a lot of ground in all sorts of weather and everyone still had smiles on their faces (a good Italian lunch helped there).

After a quick goodbye we saddled up and headed over to the bridge only to bump into the couple from Blind River again. We followed them up onto the bridge to discover a massive line up. Inching a fully loaded two-up bike five feet at a time up the side of a suspension bridge is about as much fun as it gets. Fortunately we had a great view of the river beneath us.

Sault Ste Marie is one of those places that reminds you just how big the great lakes are. In the hour plus we were inching our way over that bridge I tried to imagine the tons and tons of water that rushed beneath us out of Superior and into Huron, it feels very powerful and boggles the mind.

A highlight of the interminable wait was getting to the peak of the bridge. From that point up until the customs gates we were going downhill, so the bikes stayed off and in neutral as we glided forward, inches at a time. As I said to our doppelgangers, ‘at least it isn’t yesterday!’ That bridge on a forty degree sunny day would be unhealthy. My magic power kicked in at the split into lines for each gate. Which ever one I pick will immediately stop, and of course it did. The couple ahead of us were down the interstate a good fifteen minutes ahead of us while we sat there pondering karma, or just plain old bad luck.

Once finally freed into Michigan we headed south into the tail end of some very violent

thunderstorms. The mist became rain, and then strong winds came up out of west. It was an hour of tacking against the wind down i75 to St. Ignace and The Breaker’s Resort. We got in about 4pm drenched and weary after a long day in the rain broken up by the better part of two hours crossing the border in five foot increments. Java Joes provided a first class milkshake and coffee before we headed over to check in. They weren’t ready for us, but housekeeping did back flips to get us into the room ASAP.

We enjoyed the hot tub and pool, but Breakers is a family resort, kind of like Disney World but with a great lake instead of mice. If you like screaming, unmanaged children and drunk, indifferent parents on smartphones, this place is for you. Max and I vacated the pool in a flurry of OCD after a kid pretended to be vomiting water out over and over again.

Dinner was takeout pizza from Java Joes, and it was exceptional. With everything scattered around the room in a vain attempt to dry it out, we crashed on the beds and watched Seth Macfarlane cartoons as the fog rolled in outside. After two days and the better part of a thousand kilometres on the road, we were both pretty knackered.

We woke up early in backwards world to blue skies and the sun rising out of Lake Huron (the sun goes to sleep in Huron where we’re from). A savoury breakfast of heavily processed meat pucks and bad coffee with large Americans eating all they could while watching Trump speeches on FoxTV (we are far from home my son), had us ready to hit the road.

I wiped down the trusty Tiger and we loaded up for a day that was more about exploring than making distance (though it eventually turned into both – you’re always making distance if you’re trying to get around a great lake). After a quick fill up and a slow ride around St. Ignace’s lovely harbour, we got onto the interstate and headed for the Mackinac Bridge, it was spectacular:

The Mackinac Bridge is worth the ride!

We took our border-buddies’ advice and headed over to the Tunnel of Trees. This put us on the shore of yet another Great Lake (Lake Michigan). The micro-climate on the west shore of Michigan’s northern peninsula produces fast growth. As you ride onto that side of the peninsula everything is super green and the trees get Pandora big.

The M-119 is a twisty little blacktop that runs through those forests along the shore. It’s barely two lanes wide with no curbs or runoff. You need to keep your eyes on the narrow lane, but you’re never moving that quickly. Surrounded by a sea of green, you quickly get into a meditative mood. The Tiger can be whisper quiet when it wants to be, and we purred through that green cathedral in near silence.

You can’t help but get that look on your face on the M-119.

We ended up getting redirected off the tunnel road due to construction and never found our way back. We eventually got to Petoskey, which I was interested in seeing because it was where Earnest Hemingway used to spend his summers as a child. It’s box stores and hotels bent under the weight of lots of tourists nowadays. If Hemingway were to return, I’m not sure much of it would ring a bell.

Out of the heat in a McDonalds at lunch we ran into our doppelgangers again. They suggested an alternate route out of Petoskey and we wished each other a safe trip once again. A short time later one of the retirees working there walked up to chat about bikes, he had a big old Harley in the lot and couldn’t identify the Tiger. When I told him it was a Triumph he got the same happy, nostalgic expression that a lot of people did when I told them what we were riding. There is a lot of good will and nostalgia around the marquee in the States.

On the road again we struck east across the peninsula aiming for Alpena on the Huron coast, but between the heat, increasing traffic and the strong westerly winds, we were both losing the will to get there. We turned south on 65 and wound our way through Huron National Forest, stopping for an ice cream in Glennie. The lovely young lady who served us told of her hours spent horseback riding the day before, then three local farmers came in for a cone and were curious about the Triumph. It was all very nice. When we left she came out to her car that had a big ‘Vote Trump’ bumper sticker on it. I found it hard to reconcile how nice Americans were with the insane politics they practice.

Old Detroit charm – built back in
the day when the motor city was
a world traveller destination,
the Bay Valley Resort reminds
of the golden years.

When we finally turned onto 23 heading back out to the interstate I gave a barbaric yawp in my helmet, as it felt like we’d never get there. The final blast down the interstate in 60km/hr cross winds was performed using shear will power. We staggered in to the Bay Valley Resort after nine hours and over 450kms on the road in strong winds and relentless heat.

Bay Valley Resort was a real treat. Cheaper than Breakers, but better in every way. If you like modern hotels, this isn’t for you, but if you like character, Bay Valley has oodles. The doors are made out of wood (!), and the entire resort is situated in the middle of a golf course. It’s much more adult orientated, but it had all the accoutrements my son loves. The pool is an indoor/outdoor design with a river between them, and the spa was a hard hitting jet affair with strong bubbles perfect for loosening up sore muscles after a long day in the wind. The whole thing was set into patterned concrete. The on-site restaurant was swathed in dark wood and was both classy and dated, I loved it! The food was chef prepared but priced very reasonably. We fell asleep feeling well cared for in the silence of a golf course at night – no sounds of screaming children anywhere.

We woke up the next morning and hit the pool one last time. Max wasn’t keen to mount up for yet another day on the road. Day one had been a high mileage sweat box, day 2 a rainy, windy ride with an interminable border wait, and day 3 was a high mileage meander across the peninsula in heat and high winds. We were both tired, and having to get my pillion in motion made it even heavier. After a late breakfast we finally got on the road just before 11am and I made a command decision to take the Interstate rather than head over to the coast on another back road ride. No wind and less heat made our interstate jaunt through poor, old Flint, Michigan a relatively painless affair. Flint feels like a ghost town at the best of times, but this year it felt abandoned. We stopped at a rest stop on the i69 on the way to the Canadian border when Max got a leg cramp, but otherwise high-tailed it home.

Distracted Stratford drivers put that look on my face.

It took all of five minutes to line up and cross the border back into Sarnia. Heading into The States was misery, coming home was a dream. We stopped in Sarnia for lunch and then hit the bricks for the final ride home. We thundered up the 402 on the long legged Tiger before angling off toward Stratford on back roads. After over sixteen hundred kilometres of riding, much of it through wilderness, it was the ride through Stratford and its dithering, well dressed theatre patrons that was the most dangerous. We were cut off and almost run over by people less worried about killing us than they were making their curtain call. It was the only moment on the trip that I was tempted to chase someone down in order to thump them.

Back in the stable after a flawless
1600+kms ride, what a champ!

We finally pulled into the driveway just before 6pm, sore but elated. The ride had its challenges, but the memories made were keepers. The road into Sault Ste. Marie is lovely and surprisingly mountainous. The Mackinac Bridge is a must-do experience, and riding down the tunnel of trees is like attending the best church ever. Java Joes makes a good food stop and Bay Valley Resort is a forgotten gem worth staying at if you’re in the area.

All in all it was a great adventure, albeit a trying one. Sometimes, usually when it’s least comfortable, I wonder why I’m doing this to myself, but the memories sort out the discomfort from the awesome, and the awesome always wins.

Riding the Tunnel of Trees road in northern Michigan http://www.motorcycleroads.com/75/309/Michigan/Tunnel-of-Trees-Road.html#sthash.BxFBBpqw.dpbs – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Rainbow connection sung by Alanna

It’s an Appliance

It’s an appliance, you know, like a fridge…

I’m back at school this week and getting to know my new students. In our grade nine introduction to computers class they’re putting together tech-resumes so I can see what their background in tech is. One of the nines has a prezi covered in pictures of Ferraris. I asked him what that was all about and he said, “I love cars!”

I was surprised by my response, “they’re appliances dude!”

Some of them even look like fridges! Guess what the most
popular car colours are… just like appliances!

I’ve been a car-guy for a long time (since I got one when I was seventeen because my parents ponied up the difference between a car and the motorcycle I was going to get). On the list of things I thought I’d never say, calling cars appliances is near the top, yet out it came.

Appliances are used to make domestic chores easier, things like commuting, or going shopping. They keep you dry when it’s wet, keep you cool when it’s hot, and warm when it’s cold, and they get you where you need to go. They’re so easy to operate that most people who use them have no idea how they work and don’t care. The vast majority of people on the road last focused on how to drive when they were getting their license, once they have it they simply operate their vehicles on habit for decades. Cars are a necessary appliance for modern life, and that’s how people use them.

Fetishizing cars is where I found an odd resonance. As engineering and design efforts, I can still appreciate the mechanical and design elements some cars display (one of the reasons I still look forward to watching Top Gear who focus on those things), but when I see someone driving down the street in a pimped out Pontiac Sunfire I have to wonder what is wrong with them. It’s like putting a wing on an oven.

What kind of license do you need to drive a car? In Ontario it’s a G-general license, good for cars and light trucks. Two-thirds of Canadians have a driver’s license. Older drivers who probably shouldn’t be on the road keep general licenses active, we hand out automotive licenses to children before we allow them to vote. Driving a car offers access to an appliance that the majority of people feel they need.

When I have to take a car to work it’s for appliance like reasons (I need to pick up equipment or move stuff around), it’s never an enjoyable experience in and of itself. I want the car to work, to be efficient, and to last a long time… like any other appliance.

I drive very well. I’ve spent time and money improving my ability to handle a four wheeled vehicle in advanced driving schools and on the track and I’ve driven on both sides of the road on opposite sides of the world, but the thought of hauling tons of seats and dashboard around a track seems absurd to me now. I’ll make an exception for racing vehicles stripped to the essentials, but my interest there is mainly in the engineering rather than the driving. The complex, raw interaction between rider and machine on two wheels is much more interesting to me now.

I have been drifting away from driving as a ecologically irresponsible means of recreation for a while, though the years I’ve spent getting familiar with internal combustion engines has made me a fan of their engineering. The brutal minimalism and efficiency of a motorcycle allows me to keep that connection alive knowing that I’m burning as little gas as possible to carry the least amount of weight in the most entertaining fashion.

I’ll leave the appliances to the masses. They can get into their refrigerator white or silver vehicles and putter about in a distracted, isolated way, using way more of a diminishing natural resource and producing more waste to support a wasteful, simplistic, accessible means of transport that the majority of people can manage (poorly). I think I’m at peace with what came out of my mouth in class, though it surprised me at the time.

appliance

[uh-plahy-uh ns]

1. an instrument, apparatus, or device for a particular purpose or use.

2. a piece of equipment, usually operated electrically, especially for use in the home or for performance of domestic chores, as a refrigerator, washing machine, or toaster.

Courtesies & Confused Responsibility

Responsibility & Liability

I’m going to try and not sound like a grumpy old man in talking about this.

I had a chat with a friend the other week who is teaching in a private school in the GTA. He had an interesting observation around how students do (and mostly don’t) accept responsibility for their actions. He argued that the libelous nature of the adult world has placed everyone in the position of not being able to own up to honest errors. Rather than being able to apologize and move on, we must instead deny any wrong doing, even when it becomes absurd.

A clear example of this happened in class the other week. Three students were filming, and in the process of setting up the green screen studio they found Nerf guns and began fooling around with them. This resulted in the camera they set up on the tripod getting knocked over and broken; a $400 new camera. The response? “It’s not our fault, we didn’t mean to break it.” These two ideas are tied together in a student’s mind. You can’t be held responsible for your actions if your actions weren’t intentionally about breaking the camera. I tried to explain that it wasn’t ill-intent that led to the camera, it was incompetence, and they are responsible for their incompetence, especially when they willfully engaged in it.

This caused a great deal of confusion. Students don’t feel responsible for their actions unless they are willfully vindictive, and even then, they won’t admit to wrong doing because they never see adults doing it for fear of liability. Because of this poisoned moral environment, students also don’t understand what an accident is and how they can still be complicit in it without ill intent. Fooling around with Nerf guns is not why you were in the studio; your choice to do this led to grievous damage, for which you are responsible.

Slogging through the muddy moral world of our schools can get tiresome quickly. Incompetence cannot be considered a factor in student performance any more. I have a number of students with weeks of absences and we are only just at the half way mark of the semester. Many students will finish this semester in our school with over a month of absences, and they will still be expected to earn a credit. In many cases these absences involve family holidays during classes. Parental competence must also never be called into question either. When those students are in class, they tend to do nothing anyway, but once again, the pressure is on the teacher to ‘find a way’ to ignore incompetence, even if it is simply willful neglect, and pass students. Our idea of success has become one of pass-rates rather than teaching humans how to be responsible people.

What Manners Do For You

In the past week I’ve had a series of senior students walking into the media arts lab and asking to use equipment during class – while the students in the class needed to use it. Whenever possible I try to accommodate these requests; media arts fluency leads to greater technological fluency.

I became less willing to accommodate these requests when the students involved ignored directions, started using student computers without permission and interrupted class to demand more equipment or space. Offering open access to expensive equipment and resources is a nice thing to do, demanding it without so much as a please or thank you won’t get you very far.

This sense of belligerence isn’t unique to this generation of digital natives, though their constant split attention between the world around them and the insinuated cyber-world they also inhabit doesn’t help. Teens have always been known for socially awkward, often rude, behavior; it’s a fun part of their stereotype. The ironic thing is that in my experience this is human nature, not just a teen one. People in general tend toward rudeness, a mannered response is usually a pleasant surprise.

The post modern view of courtesy or manners is one of an anachronistic, inefficient time waster. Just look at our modern success stories (Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates, Eminem) for an idea of how we value individualized competitiveness, intellectual superiority and financial success as mutually exclusive from polite, collaborative interaction; we love despotism and see the rudeness inherent in it as a strength.

What politeness does is make explicit what is happening between people. When you inconvenience someone by putting your own needs first, you can say things like “excuse me” or “sorry to bother you, but…”, and everyone involved knows that you are aware of the interruption you have caused. When you thank someone for their efforts, you’re acknowledging how they put your interests before their own. Courtesies are focused on verbalizing the necessity of supporting each other in a collaborative manner.

Polite Responsibility

We throw all that out when we start to mix the nasty habits developed around liability law with how we interact with each other. For fear of financial penalty, those students couldn’t simply say the truth: “we’re sorry, we should have known better than to screw around under those circumstances.” They don’t enjoy the release of pent up guilt that comes with apologizing honestly for an unintended outcome. They also haven’t verbalized wrong action and have missed out on the meta-cognitive reinforcement that happens when you describe what you’ve done in honest terms. They carry all that negativity forward.

I was watching soccer yesterday and an obvious handball occurred inside the goalie crease. In my perfect world the offender it happened to would go to the ref and opposing player and say, “yes, it hit my arm. It was a sudden, hard shot and I couldn’t have gotten my arm out of the way in time anyway.” The shooter would then be given the penalty shot and he would have kicked it wide on purpose. Instead, the player stood there stony faced, and said nothing as he knew the rules of the game had been broken, but could not afford the liability of admitting truth.

We do this in our games, our businesses are founded on this concept of non-admittance of wrong doing, and our governments don’t know how to operate any other way. It’s no wonder that we should do it in our schools if we’re going to get our students ready for the adult world waiting for them.

The moral order of operations we need to train our students in to prepare for adulthood:

It’s best to say nothing than admit wrong doing or incompetence.
It’s best to lie than to admit wrong doing or incompetence.
It’s best to accept punishment but still admit to no wrong doing, or incompetence.
Ignore courtesies, they are a sign of dependence and weakness.

Bikers

The other week I posted a discussion on the Concours Owners Group asking how to pass a large group of bikers on the road. That discussion sparked an angry rebuttal condemning me for mocking the happy pirate look that a large portion of the (especially) North American motorcycle community identifies with. Personally, I’d say people can dress however they want and ride whatever they want, but I get the sense that the pirate types don’t feel that way.

On COG I was trying to be funny, but with an edge. On the Georgian Bay circumnavigation I ran into some corporately attired Harley riders who wanted to point out how much unlike them I looked. It felt like hazing with the intent of getting me to look like a proper biker. Nothing will get my back up faster than someone telling me I have conform to their standard. The irony wasn’t lost on me that these rebels without a clue whose look is predicated on nonconformity were uncomfortable with a motorcyclist not in proper uniform.

One of the reasons I make a point of reading British biking magazines is because they are free of (and willing to make fun of) this dominant North American biking culture. They don’t worship Harley Davidson as the one and only motor company, and they try to look at the breadth of motorbiking rather than forcing a single version of it down everyone’s throats. Had I the boat load of money that they cost I would happily buy an HD V-Rod (not considered a ‘real’ Harley by purists because it’s liquid cooled). It’s a fine machine and I’d get one for that reason, but I don’t think I’d ever buy a motorcycle because of the manufacturer alone, I’m not that politically driven.

When I first started riding I was shiny and new about it and told one of my colleagues who rode that I was just starting out. He asked me what I got and when I told him a Ninja he put his nose in the air and said, “hmm, isn’t that like riding tupperware?” Just recently I told him I was thinking about getting a dual sport. He said, “why would you want that? It’d be like riding a toolbox!” In the biker ethos there is only one kind of bike with a single aesthetic. If you don’t conform, expect criticism.

In talking to other motorcyclists the non-mainstream/biker crowd sometimes find biker types to be holier-than-thou, not returning a wave or giving you the gears at a stop for not conforming to the dress code.

Motorcyclists tend to be iconoclasts, they have to be or they’d be doing what everyone else does riding around in the biggest cage they could afford. Yet the act of riding isn’t enough for some, there are also social expectations that these rebellious non-conformists expect all riders to conform to.

At the end of the day I’m a fan of two wheeling. I’d call myself a motorcyclist. I get as excited about looking at historical Harleys as I do at racing tupperware or riding toolboxes. I only wish more bikers would be less critical of anything other than their singular view of the sport.

I refuse to conform to their nonconformity.

What is Professionalism?

A long, contemplative ride
on the road less travelled to
self directed PD.

I attended Edcamp Hamilton this past weekend. On a Saturday morning what did almost one hundred teachers and administrators do on the eve of a strike? They spent their own time and money to travel to Ancaster to direct their own professional development.

Discussions ranged from technology integration to how to most effectively assess student learning (along with dozens of other topics). What is magical about the edcamp experience is that teachers direct their own research and reflection. There is no top down directive or education consultant being paid to sell an idea. No one is paid to be there, no one is expected to be there, yet the room was full at 8:30 on a Saturday morning.

I’ve long thought that self-direction is the key element in professional development. I’d actually argue that PD isn’t PD unless it is self directed. When you’re sat in a room being indoctrinated by a talking head it isn’t professional or development, it would be better described as mediocre training. Lecturing a group of people implies that they lack knowledge and need to be informed. It implies that they aren’t professionals but unskilled employees who need direction.

I’ve got PD coming up this week. PD often involves a paid consultant earnestly exhorting you to differentiate your teaching practice, but they do it in a completely undifferentiated, university style lecture. If student centred differentiation is what you’re selling, selling it in a lecture is either incredibly lazy or ignorant. In any case it suggests a lack of integrity.

I’m trying to work out what professionalism
is in a Prezi mindmap

The professional is, at their core, self directed. You don’t become an expert in something without being able to self assess and improve your own practice. Integrity should drive this self directed improvement by demanding competence. That competence naturally creates a sense of responsibility that a professional is more than happy to be accountable for. Self direction and the integrity that drives it creates a professionally responsible environment that accepts stringent accountability.

In order to develop professional standards, professionals need only be left to their own devices, and perhaps given the time and space by management to focus on excellence. Edcamps encourage this kind of professional development, in fact they can’t happen without it. PLCs also facilitate professional development by leaving the professional to develop their own means of improvement. I’ve been involved in learning fairs, unconferences and other teacher centred/teacher presented learning opportunities that have been invaluable as well as empowering.

The difference between a talented amateur and a professional is that the professional is committed to improvement and is thus willing to be accountable to their profession. The professional abides by the practices and standards of their profession and actively works to raise them. In this way a professional has a social responsibility to their profession that a dilettante doesn’t, no matter how talented they might be. The professional isn’t a one trick pony who acts solely on talent, but a talented individual who begins with natural inclination and then works to develop it into a much wider skill-set that acknowledges the full complexity of their discipline. Some secondary teachers fall into thinking that they are a subject expert before they are a teacher. Being a subject expert isn’t what they are being paid (professionally) to do, it’s teaching. Teaching is the professional practice we (especially at the secondary level) sometimes forget.

Accountability is where professional development with teachers seems to fall apart. Management fears that if left to their own devices some teachers will not actively work to improve their professional standards. In some cases this may in fact be true. It would be a fairly simple task to itemize the professional development opportunities teachers pursue and account for who is attempting to improve their professional practice and who isn’t, but we don’t do that in teaching.

The teachers who go out of their way to attend (or speak!) at conferences, who expand their professional qualifications, who attend edcamps, or work in their subject councils, or participate in online communities, these teachers have made quantifiable efforts to improve their profession. The teacher who rolls his eyes at another board run PD which he is only attending because he is being paid to be there is simply not professional in the same sense. They are the ones who ‘professional development’ is aimed at.

Instead of only looking at years in the classroom it would be nice if we accepted that some teachers take on a more professional approach to teaching. It would be easy enough to quantify that approach. How many subject areas have they become qualified in? Do they demonstrate continuous improvement? How many self directed PD opportunities do they take? Do they take on positions of extra responsibility? What do they do to support their subject area? The profession of teaching in general? Until we accept that not all teachers are created equal, we ignore both integrity and responsibility and are unable to accurately apply accountability to our profession.

Is teaching a job that requires management to take attendance and force simplistic PD down people’s throats? Evidently, in which case it isn’t really a professional activity. Is teaching a profession that demands self directed development through stringent accountability? If it was it would be driven by teachers’ professionalism rather than by attendance rolls and tell-me-don’t-show-me lectures.

At the core of professional practice is the self directed development of your expertise. I’ve got a PD day (the only one this semester) next Friday. It will be interesting to see how this board run day will compare to the dynamic and responsive urgency of the edcamp I just attended. I imagine I’ll see differences in the first few moments when teachers I never see doing self-directed PD are whining about why they have to be there (because they’re being paid to do it). Then they will take attendance and the differences will only get more obvious.

Professionalism Resources:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/professionalism.htm

http://www.med.uottawa.ca/students/md/professionalism/eng/about.html

#edcampham discussion suggestion

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/100047/chapters/Professionalism,_Teacher_Efficacy,_and_Standards-Based_Education.aspx

http://education.und.edu/field-placement/files/docs/professionalism.pdf

http://www.slideshare.net/jazzmichelepasaribu/professionalism-in-education

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042810025498

Conformity is happiness

Having a son a lot like myself, I’m watching in dismay as the school system does to him what it tried to do to me. A quiet, shy boy who likes to do his own thing, my son gets very anxious in group situations and tends to shut down, go off into his own head. I suspect that when this happens his teachers think that nothing is happening, that he’s just standing there blank, but I know this isn’t the case, because I do the same thing.

When people are too much with me (which happens in large groups or very loud situations), I daydream to give my mind some place to play. Standing in a large, noisy group of grade ones repetitively voicing lyrics for the Christmas concert would have lost me quickly, as they did my son. Somehow, his music teacher believes this means he is a failure in music. I’m not sure how group choral singing and dancing is the sum total means of assessing musical skill, but I suppose in some people’s minds it is.

Ultimately, it seems that, to an elementary teacher, an unresponsive child is somehow blank. I teach myself, so I recognize the challenges of trying to get an accurate assessment of skills in a classroom full of students, but a lot of this can be mitigated by differentiating instruction and differentiating evaluation. Many opportunities to demonstrate a skill in different contexts is, again, a challenge, but if we’re not there to try and create circumstances in which a student can show their best selves, why are we there?

Last year I was at a PD in which the instructor said that he was astonished to see so many secondary teachers out, because usually they don’t care anything for PD, differentiating instruction, collaborative assessment or technology in education. My department head and I looked at each other and asked the obvious question, “why would you want to antagonize your audience in the first five minutes?”

He went on to (admiringly) describe elementary teachers as paragons of modern educational philosophy, masters of DI, experts in assessment, the very flowers of the education system. He was then frustrated that his room full of secondary teachers appeared unwilling to interact and ask questions during his presentation.

So here I am, looking at the system as a parent for the first time. In my view, the elementary system is designed around standardized testing. The curriculum is so tightly prescribed and detailed that teachers have little latitude in how they can present it and how long they have to assess it. As a result, they are approaching the education of younger students in a very mechanical, statistical manner. This is something that somehow proves to those in charge that elementary teachers are superior – working within a coherent system that produces students who all think similarly and demonstrate the same skills at the same skill level. Administrators must love this; what a great opportunity to produce STATISTICS.

I have no doubt that there are secondary teachers who love this kind of order (most become administrators). A wonderful world of easily organizable human beings who all do the same things, the same way at the same level. It’s the stuff curriculums are made of. But in my experience, especially in the humanities and the arts (and increasingly in science and even math), secondary teachers are actually more interested in trying to arrange conditions for success with their students, rather than comparing them to an artificial and arbitrary set of standards being designed by a MINISTRY somewhere.

One way this happens is by recognizing that teaching and learning are a biological process, and that they happen for students at different times in different ways. This isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be expectations of what a human being is capable of, the last thing I’d advocate for is a lowest common denominator approach to human being, but an education system that is overly prescribed is probably serving its own bureaucracy rather than its students.

The board keeps showing us Sir Ken’s mighty speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U You’ve probably seen it. Watching it at this last PD through the lens of a frustrated parent of a grade one boy born in October, I was most struck by his comments on our infatuation with date of manufacture. We have built one of the largest public institutions around this idea, mainly for the convenience of the bureaucracy that runs it. (I live in hope that peak oil will break this tyranny: https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZ3Xb3MP_t-cZGRnM2o2bXBfMjZkaGZndmNoaA&hl=en&authkey=CLqOsqIN )

In the meantime, I’ve been talking to colleagues who have atypical children and their only advice is cry long, cry loud and never let them become complacent. It makes me feel sorry for all those kids whose parents are too intimidated, or uncaring, or too busy to advocate as loudly.

There has to be a better way, for everyone involved.